Engineering Manager and Evangelist

Archive for June, 2003

Scott Keene has just released MXNAPing 1.0, a ColdFusion component for pinging the Macromedia XML News Aggregator. “Pinging” refers to the process of sending MXNA an XML-RPC request with a special ID in it that tells MXNA that you have just updated your blog. MXNA then knows to go pick up your RSS feed and get your new post aggregated immediately. MXNA checks all of its feeds twice an hour, however by pinging MXNA, you can make sure your posts are picked up instantly. For more information about pinging MXNA, including instructions on how to configure Movable Type for pings, see the MXNA FAQ. For information on pinging MXNA from PHP, see Rob Hall’s recent work. Anyone want to have a go at Java support?

Yesterday I wrote about how to sort ColdFusion arrays using the static sort() method on the java.util.Arrays object. The original question that inspired the post was actually about sorting 2-dimensional arrays. The answer is that you can sort 2-dimensional arrays using the technique I wrote about yesterday, but only in one dimension.

Macromedia recently announced that Spectra will be opensourced, which means that you will be able to download the source code for free, and both build and deploy Spectra applications under the macromedia Spectra Software License, which is based on the Apache Software Foundation license. I haven’t played with Spectra myself, however now that it looks like it might come back to life, I’ll have to give it a shot.

This is the full post that Tim Buntel made to the spectra-talk list yesterday:

There were some comments on my weblog yesterday about using Java to sort ColdFusion arrays. The only problem is that you can’t pass ColdFusion arrays into Java where Java is expecting an Array. Why? Because ColdFusion arrays aren’t Java Arrays. They are, in fact, java.util.Vectors. Fortunately, it is easy to get an Array from a java.util.Vector. The following code demonstrates how to turn a ColdFusion array into a Java Array, and how to use Java to sort it:

Robert Hall of Feasible Impossibilities has put together a PHP script for pinging MXNA, the Macromedia XML News Aggregator. If your weblog is implemented in PHP, or if you have PHP installed on a server somewhere and you want to use it to make pinging MXNA easier, you might want to check out Rob’s script.

You also might want to just check out the Feasible Impossibilities site if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s pretty wild. The floating hand is cool, if a little eerie with the accompanying sound effects. You can even watch Rob work on a live webcam, however he doesn’t appear to be moving too much this morning. He ought to add a “prod” button.

There was a post on the BACFUG mailing list yesterday which I think makes for a good tip. Someone was asking how to use the arraySort function to sort two-dimensional arrays, which it does not support. The response was a recommendation to create a query instead, then use query of query to get the record set in the correct order. What would you suggest?

Michael Smith and rest of the TeraTech gang did an outstanding job with CFUN 2003 this year. I believe attendance was about 350 with a total of 40 sessions and several other events, including a great party Saturday night. I attended sessions by Matt Liotta, Hal Helms, Samuel Neff, Simon Horwith and Raymond Camden. I only wish I could have seen some of the other sessions that were going on in parallel to the sessions I attended.

Anyway, I don’t know what Michael’s plans are for next year, but if you can make it to CFUN 2004, I highly recommend it.

In a few hours, I’ll be heading up to Maryland for CFUN 2003. Judging by the list of speakers, it should be a great event. If you live in the area and have nothing else going on this weekend, stop by. Bring the kids and start them learning from some of the best in the industry.

I don’t know what kind of access I’ll have at the conference, so I may be radio-silent for a couple days, but I will post a summary of the event as soon as I’m sufficiently connected again.

I made a post recently on using ColdFusion to write out binary data to the output stream in order to allow me to serve an image or other binary file that doesn’t exist on disk. The original code I posted looked like this:

Macromedia’s own Jeff Whatcott was interview by SYS-CON radio at JavaOne last week. He discusses Royale, JRun and, of course, ColdFusion MX. You can check out the introduction (search for Whatcott — he’s about halfway down the page), or go directly to the MP3 file.